Want to see what it's like to build your own homemade fuel injection? This blog is dedicated to do it yourself car mods, especially a Megasquirt installation in my 1966 Dodge Dart. You'll also find information about tools, racing, and various mad scientist projects.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

BMW's Turbosteamer

Here's an interesting bit of automotive technology in the news. When I was a kid, I once had a crazy idea to take the heat from the exhaust of an engine and use it to drive a steam engine. Free power from exhaust heat sounded like a good idea, but since it seems pretty obvious and nobody had done it to my knowledge, I figured there had to be some problem and I kind of forgot about the idea.

Turns out, the idea wasn't so crazy after all. BMW has built a device they call theTurbosteamer, which is a steam engine built into a car's exhaust system. The results were very impressive - more horsepower, more torque, more gas mileage, more thermal efficiency. The only downside was that it added a little bit of weight. Well, and I suppose it wouldn't work too well on a turbocharged engine since they are already using the heat from the exhaust gas. While it won't work with a conventional turbo, it could work with a hybrid gas-electric drivetrain. That might produce some very interesting results when it comes to fuel economy - not to mention have the techie appeal of having a car driven by three different kinds of motors at once.

There's a couple more pictures from the BMW press release making their way around the Internet. From the looks of things, it may actually be possible to pull one off a junkyard car once they show up in junkards and slap them on cars that never had a Turbosteamer. Just take the expansion unit off a BMW and attach it to the crank pulley of another engine with a Gilmer style drive belt, and add the necessary heat exchangers. Probably a lot of fabrication but not any more work than some attempts at adding junkyard superchargers.